I’m going to die on November 5, 2055. So says the nifty little quiz I just filled out on the internet. And though it’s hard to put much faith in the accuracy of a prediction based in part on how often I recycle (question number five), this is good information to have. Because whether the date is exact or not, the truth of it is.

One day, I’m going to die.

November 5, 2055, does seem reasonable. I’ll be eighty-three years old then, and my children will be in their late forties. I’ll most likely have grandchildren, be retired, and spend most of my days telling everyone who will listen that the world was a much better place back in 2013.

So yes, dying at eighty-three would be okay with me. That’s a good age to smile at this world and wave goodbye, right there in the meaty part between hanging around too long and not long enough.

At least, that’s what I thought. I’m not so sure now. Having forty-two years left for me to finish whatever it is I want to start seems like a lot of time, but it isn’t when you start to dig a little deeper. Trust me. Because that’s what I did.

If the scribbles on the sheet of paper in front of me are right, most of my remaining forty-two years are already spoken for. I’ll spend twelve of them sleeping, three eating, ten either exercising or resting, and another ten just on home maintenance.

All of which leaves me with a grand total of eleven years to live. One hundred and thirty-two months to make a difference.

Not a lot, is it? Especially considering the fact that November 5, 2055 is at best an approximation and at worst a clever marketing ploy designed to deluge me with junk mail. My end may come later. It may also come before I finish writing this. I don’t know.
None of us do.

Which is why it amazes me that we always think there is time. Plenty of time. There’s always tomorrow, we say. And that may be true for some of us. But not for everyone.

About 146,000 people in the world will wake up this morning thinking there’s plenty of time, not knowing this will be their last day in this life. That’s 6,098 people an hour, 102 people every minute, and about 2 per second. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, twenty people have died.

Amazing, isn’t it? Sad, too. Not because our lives must end, but because the thought of death rarely crosses our minds.

Life fools us into thinking it is this hulking, indestructible beast, when it’s really as fragile as a porcelain figurine . It is holy and sacred and fleeting and never guaranteed. Believing otherwise is not only dangerous to us, it’s dangerous to how we live.

The truth? We don’t have plenty of time. Our every breath is the oil that moves the gears of our days, sending us closer to the moment when we say goodbye to this world and hello to the next. We can’t put off chasing that dream. We can’t delay making those amends. We can’t wait to say “I love you” or “I’m sorry.”

We can’t linger when it comes to the things that make living worthwhile, the people and the dreams that give us meaning. We have to take care of them every minute, every moment. Because maybe they or we won’t be here the next.

There is no time for doubts. No time for hate. No time for hanging on when it’s time to let go and letting go when it’s time to hang on. We get one shot at this world, one chance to do something good and right and true. That time isn’t later. It’s now.

I read an article last week about how scientists are just now getting results from tests they ran on a 126,000-year-old human. Mabe Man, they call him, because he was found near Mabe in China’s Guandong Province.

Not really the sort of article I would be interested in, but I had some time to kill and it was either that or stare at the wall in front of me. So I kept reading.

I’m glad I did.

Seems Mabe Man had a rough go at it. That in itself isn’t surprising—I would imagine life back then was fraught with all sorts of peril, not the least of which was where to find the next meal. Life expectancy hovered around thirty years. Our place in the food chain was somewhere south of saber-toothed tigers.

When Mabe Man was first discovered in 1958, his bones were cataloged, shoved in a museum basement, and promptly forgotten. It was only recently that he was rediscovered again. Fortunately, science has progressed quite a bit over the last 60 years. There’s a lot we can know about him now that could only be guessed then, and a lot of fancy tests that can help bring out the humanity in our ancestors. Things like a simple CT scan, for instance. When the scientists did just that, what they found was morbidly interesting in the same way as witnessing the aftermath of a car wreck.

To break it down to a level I could understand, Mabe Man had gotten the hell beaten out of him.

His skull had been fractured. Scientists concluded it was the result of blunt force trauma. Not your everyday sort of blunt force trauma, either. This poor guy didn’t receive his injuries by tripping over a rock in some primeval forest. No, he was beaten. The conclusion was that his wounds could have only been given by some sort of clubbed weapon.

The scientists seemed surprised at that finding. Not me. And I doubt that deep down you’re not very surprised, either. Recorded history is full of violence. Full of war and hate and bloodshed. I read once that when all the annals of every nation’s history are combined, what you get is a total of seven years of peace. Seven out of tens of thousands. We’ve always hurt each other. We always will. It’s a basic tenet of the Christian faith—we all sin and fall short of the glory of God.

Mabe Man’s story could end there, but it doesn’t. There’s more. His wounds would have caused excessive bleeding and a severe concussion. Brain damage would have been likely. He was helpless. And 126,000 years ago, being helpless meant you were dead.

But he didn’t die.

His wounds healed.

And not only did they heal, but he lived for years afterward.

Why? Because he was cared for. He was nursed back to health. His wounds were bound and his stomach was filled and he was given shelter.

Scientists seemed even more surprised at that. Mabe Man survived because he was loved.

Me, I find a beauty there, and also a profound truth. It means love has always sought to put back together that which hate has broken. It means that our hands have always been able to heal as much as harm. It means that since the dawn of humanity, each of us contains three people—the angel, the demon, and the one who decides which we will obey. That’s what it means to be human.

I don’t know how you spent the day after the election. Chances are you were either celebrating or in mourning, depending upon whether you call yourself blue or red. In either case, this one seemed more emotional than usual, didn’t it? We’ve either gained so much or lost so much, brightened our future or darkened it. There seems to be little middle ground, and there are a great many among us who believe our country close to some fundamental unraveling by the zealots on the right or the liberals on the left. Strange as it may be, this seems to be the one thing we can all agree on.

Me, I neither cheered nor mourned. I instead spent the day after the election at a funeral for my grandmother in-law. She closed her eyes to one world and opened them to another last Sunday at the age of 95.

We gathered along the mountain slopes at a small Baptist church with a graveyard pocked by tiny Confederate flags that marked the resting places of the Civil War’s fallen.

A hundred of us, more or less, half of which were family and the other half friends, all of us united in celebrating that one life. One life that you may believe was wholly insignificant, given the fact that she spent most of it on a 200-acre farm at the base of the mountain.

She was a quiet soul, my grandmother in-law. Born at the beginning of World War I, married during the Great Depression and married still sixty-four years later, when her husband passed. In between she’d given birth to ten children, was a grandmother to more than I can count, great-grandmother to my own children, and great-great grandmother to more. At her service, five generations were in attendance.

Think about that.

Her life was built upon three guiding principles: faith, family, and farm. She loved her God, loved her husband and children, and loved the tiny plot of Earth she’d been given. Of all the accolades I heard in her name yesterday, my favorite were her hands. They weren’t smoothed or polished or wrinkle-free, but calloused and scarred from years of labor, most of which was spent near the woodstove upon which she cooked her family’s meals. That was her thing. Neither electricity or gas would do when it came to supper. Food tastes better when it’s cooked over a fire. I know this for a fact.

The picture you see to the right is the view from her graveside. My faith and hers says she is in a far better place just this moment, but I expect there is also no small measure of comfort in knowing her earthly body rests in view of the mountains by her farm. The very ones she would watch from the porch swing on all those calm, silent days.

I share her with you because sometimes I listen to the buzzing too much. I watch the pundits and read the columnists and hear their screaming, telling me all is lost and everything has changed and we are all heading toward an end from which we cannot turn away.

Hear me plain: Don’t listen to them.

Because the heart of this country does not beat in Washington, DC, nor does its soul lie in a seat of power, nor does its destiny lie in which party occupies which section of government.

No, those things all lie with people like my grandmother in-law, people like you and me, people who get up and go to work and love their tiny plot of Earth and whose hands are rough and hardened by loving and giving.

That’s the term we use here in the Virginia mountains, the term I’ve used in front of my children—“Passed On.” I’m fond of that term. It offers an image of moving rather than holding still. This person we knew, he may not be here any longer, but he is elsewhere. Laughing and living still. And waiting, for us.

Neither of my kids seem to be much impressed with “Passed On.” It still means the same thing, they say. Still means DEAD. To them, you might as well call a thing just what it is, and it doesn’t matter if you’re Passed On or Dead or if you’re Making A Trip To The Boneyard, it all means you’re gone and you won’t be back.

So my kids say. And though normally I’d take them both to task for believing such, I’m letting it pass this time. They have other things on their minds at the moment. Big things. Heavy things. You see, this is the first time my children have had to face the fact that sometimes prayer does not work. That sometimes, God says no.

They prayed nightly for our friend’s healing. It was right at the top of the list, the first petition after a good round of thank-Yous. Both of my kids possess in abundance that childlike faith the Bible says moves mountains. But not this time. This time, they are left with the hard truth that sometimes God delivers from death, and other times He delivers through it.

It’s a hard lesson for us all, no matter the age. A harder one, perhaps, is coming in the next months: that lesson of moving on, of having this person they’ve known and prayed over for years slip from their minds. They’ll ponder our friend, they’ll still pray for the family he left behind, but sooner or later dust will turn to dust and the cares of this world will move on. Sooner or later, we all move on.

That moving on is another kind of pain, a different one, yet my children will find it stings just as much.

The parenting books aren’t much help when it comes to situations such as these. Nor grandparents, nor pastors, nor close friends. They’ve all told me much the same—that life has a way of carving itself into you and hollowing you out. It hurts (oh yes, it most certainly hurts), but once that carving is done you find that the very God who once said no now says yes, and those deep grooves are filled with a grace and a love that makes you whole again.

I will tell my children this. I imagine it will not do them much good just yet.

Last Saturday I donned my best suit and tie and drove to the local funeral home, where I faced the unenviable task of expressing condolences to a family suffering through the worst kind of pain: the death of the man who was both husband and father.

Funeral homes rank just below hospitals as Worst Places I Want to Visit, and it’s still a pretty close race.
The reasons weren’t all that obvious. I knew what was waiting for me on the other side of this world, knew that however much suffering and pain involved in getting there was worth the price, and knew that, in the end, everything would be just fine.

I didn’t like funeral homes because I was afraid of death. I was mournful of the pain the dead left behind. Like the pain felt by the wife left to tend to her family, the children left to mourn their lost innocence, and the parents who were burying their son. Parents who once found comfort in knowing they would pass first through the thin veil between this world and the next, but who were now left with the hard-won knowledge that it’s often the things we most take for granted in life that disappoint us in the end.

Standing in front of the open casket, I pondered who this person was. Son and brother. Soldier. Factory worker. Known to his family as Sweetheart and Dad, Lover and Best Friend. Lived a good life. Was a good man.

“It was so sudden, wasn’t it?” sobbed a stranger beside me.

I nodded to her. She was right. He left for the grocery store and offered a quick “Be back soon” to his family, but what came back was merely the earthen vessel I was looking down upon. One moment here, the next gone.

I moved on to others who represented a small portion of his friends and family, engaging myself in the polite and hushed conversations that funeral homes require. Small talk, mostly. Weather and crops first, which merged into recollections of the deceased second, which moved on to the sadness last.

Each exchange brought a variation of the sobbing woman beside me had said moments before.

“It was so sudden,” she had said.
Echoed by others as:

“He passed so quickly.”

“He died far too young.”

“There was no warning.”

I listened to them all, keeping my answers brief. A Yes to the question of “Horrible, isn’t it?” A nod to “Such a shame.”

A shame, yes. Unfortunate and horrible. But as I looked upon the solemn faces of the gathered, I realized there was far worse shame and misfortune in this life. Far worse horrors.

Should the quickness of a death that must come to us all be cause for added grief? Perhaps. But perhaps it would do us all well to remember that the next moment is never guaranteed. And perhaps it would do us all well to know there is a death worse than what I experienced in that room. One that does not strike with speed, but numbness.

Far worse than the buried dead are those who have perished and yet still walk. Those who have yielded to the crushing weight of the world, who have surrendered their hopes and dreams to the arid winds of despair. Who have seen too much darkness and so surrendered their light, believing it to be too faint to matter.

That life must simply be endured is among the worst of lies. We are not merely to tolerate this world, but overcome it. We are called not to plod on, but to laugh and skip.

God commands us not to guard our hearts, but to give them freely. To feel pain instead of ignoring it, if only so that pain can turn to greater joy. To face our struggles with steeled eyes and iron will. To take the arrows of circumstance in our chests, marching forward, and not our backs in retreat.

This is our duty. Our charge. And to fail is to fail both ourselves and our God. It is to meet the end before our ending. That is the worst death. Not the one that robs the body of its soul, but the heart of its passion.

The division of Helen Long’s estate was fairly straightforward. Her two story Cape Cod was to be sold and the proceeds divided between her daughter, Tina, and Mark and Matthew, her two sons. Personal items that held sentimental value were evenly distributed, stocks were liquidated and moved to provide for the grandchildren’s college education, and the vacation home in the Outer Banks was to be shared by everyone as a way to keep the family from drifting apart.

That last bit wouldn’t happen. Not to Helen Long’s family. She had spent too much time and given too much effort in keeping her family together to have them fall apart once she was gone. It was her mission in life, her purpose, and she could think of no better goal to devote her life to fulfilling.

She had done a good job, too. Having your last remaining parent pass away can bring out the worst in families, but this wasn’t the case for the Long family. In the months between the news that Helen’s cancer had spread and her death, she took great pains to ensure everything would go as smoothly as possible.

Funeral arrangements were made. Last minute bills were paid. And though Helen didn’t frequent church nearly as often as her children, her pastor visited often in the last weeks.

In a way, Helen’s passing was to be her crowning achievement. She, not her husband, had kept the family close over the years. There had never been rifts or disputes between the kids, never so much as an argument. Her dying wish was to keep it that way, to give her family something that would allow them to remember their mother’s love. Even in death, Helen would teach them.

And oh, did she teach them.

The funeral services were handled with both precision and ease. There was sadness, much sadness, but there had been ample time for goodbyes. Mark, Matthew, and Tina held their own. Even the grandchildren didn’t cry. The pastor himself said it was one of the most peaceful funerals he’d ever presided over.

When the lawyer called a week later for the reading of Helen’s will, it was only the children who attended. Their spouses and children didn’t feel a need to play referee or look after the best interests of their mates. After all, everything had already been settled. Everything would be fine.
They were right about the former assumption. The latter, not so much. Because while Helen had included her children in all of the planning, she neglected to mention the letter.

The lawyer presented the envelope to them and asked that they verify it had not been tampered with. Tina gave a sideways look to Matthew, who echoed it to Mark.

The lawyer lifted his reading glasses to his eyes and leaned back in his worn leather chair as he carefully slit the envelope open, revealing a single sheet of paper upon which a single paragraph had been written:

Dear Children,

Do not mourn for me because I will not know it. I’m gone. That’s it, just gone. Don’t go fooling yourselves into thinking that I’m sitting on a cloud somewhere with a smile on my face and wings on my back, because I’m not. I’m dead. There’s nothing after this life, so remember what I always told you—all you have is each other.

For the first time since her mother’s death, Tina began to cry.

Helen’s three children sat silent as the lawyer then proceeded to review the contents of the will, all of which didn’t matter before the letter and only mattered less after. Because the money and the trinkets and the vacation house wouldn’t make up for the fact that they would never see their mother again.

All this time, and they never knew. Tina and her brothers all attended church regularly, and they all were certain of their eternal home. They simply took it for granted that Helen was certain, too. After all, she had sat beside them many times in church.

But neither of them had ever bothered to make sure. They never asked that question. And now, suddenly, it was too late.

Two years after her mother’s death, Tina still carries that letter tucked inside a pocket of her purse. She showed it to me last week. The ink was worn and the paper crumpled, as if it had been thrown away and reclaimed time upon time.

“I can’t let it go,” Tina said. “I never will.”

I don’t expect she will. I wouldn’t, either. Tina still carries the burden of never asking her mother if her soul was secure. She holds out hope Helen’s mind was changed in her last minutes of life. That the letter was written in a bout with hopelessness and despair that was lifted in that last breath, and she will see her mother again.